Her people, relieved to find that the enemy did
not mean to mistreat noncombatants who obeyed his code of laws, were
going about their affairs in such odd hours as they could spare from
watching the unending gray freshet that roared and pounded through their
streets. The flags were down and the counterfeit light-heartedness was
gone; but essentially she was the same Brussels.
Coming now, however, six weeks later, I found a city that had been
transformed out of her own customary image by captivity and hunger and
hard-curbed resentment. The pulse of her life seemed hardly to beat at
all. She lay in a coma, flashing up feverishly sometimes at false
rumors of German repulses to the southward.
Only the day before we arrived a wild story got abroad among the
starvelings in the poorer quarters that the Russians had taken Berlin
and had swept across Prussia and were now pushing forward, with an
irresistible army, to relieve Brussels. So thousands of the deluded
populace went to a bridge on the eastern outskirts of the town to catch
the first glimpse of the victorious oncoming Russians; and there they
stayed until nightfall, watching and hoping and--what was more pitiable
--believing.
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